Many network-based commerce systems have emerged in the past several years. Through network-based commerce systems, potential sellers can enter information about their product or service for potential buyers to bid on. The information submitted by potential sellers is then organized, stored and presented as a listing by the network-based commerce system. Potential buyers can search through the organized seller information to find products or services on which they wish to purchase. A purchase price may be established with respect to a particular listing utilizing one of a number of price-setting mechanisms. For example, a particular commerce system may support one or more of a fixed price-setting mechanism (e.g., the seller publishes a price at which the item is to be sold, this price being fixed) and an auction price-setting mechanism.
Considering an auction price-setting mechanism, once a bidder locates an item (or listing) to bid on, the bidder can compete with other bidders for the item by submitting bids during a specified auction time period. At the end of the specified auction time period, the highest bid bidder is notified and the transaction between the seller and the highest bid bidder is facilitated.
While the current network-based commerce systems work well, a number of significant technical challenges to the automation of the commerce process remain. For example, many items in a network-based commerce system providing an auction price-setting mechanism have at most one bid during the specified auction time. An interested bidder must sometimes wait days for an auction to end even though his or her bid is the only bid received. Also, there are many potential buyers who do not like auction formats.
Another problem occurs when a seller sets an artificially high reserve price for a product listing, which turns out to be higher than any bidder is willing to pay for the Rev, listing and/or higher than a market price for the item. In this situation, the relevant item may not sell.
However, unlike traditional brick and mortar commerce locations that generally have sales representatives to answer questions about a good or service, network-based commerce systems (e.g., websites) may not have the capability to ask questions about the good/service, or the provision of such help functions may be expensive.